If you’re a geriatric millennial, as I am, the news that Lost in Translation is 20 years old will probably make you feel, simply, geriatric. When you think about it, though, the plot feels its age. An overprivileged middle-aged man (grumpy about earning $2m for a week’s work in Japan) having an affair in a five-star hotel with an overprivileged woman half his age (fresh out of Yale, cadging a free ride to Tokyo from her celeb photographer boyfriend) hardly screams Hollywood zeitgeist in 2023. Bill Murray is no longer the cool ironic choice for a younger generation, but a problematic old man, and when Lost in Translation was made, he was 52, feasibly old enough to be Scarlett Johansson’s grandfather; “Charlotte” is placed in her 20s, but the actor was just 17 at the time of filming. Not to mention the scenes in the movie in which Japanese people are mocked and reduced to such an extent I can’t believe director Sofia Coppola let the actors carry them out: “short and sweet – very Japanese”, Murray’s Bob Harris patronises after a brief greeting by his business associates, and, after seeing Charlotte’s bruised toe, suggests serving it up in a restaurant; “in this country? Somebody’s gotta prefer a black toe – haaa brack toe!”. Just a couple of cringey moments amid a litany of “Japanese people are small and can’t pronounce English” jokes.
Lost in Translation is, however, more than the sum of its parts and, try as I might, I cannot un-love it. As a child, I was lifted from a terrace house in Sheffield and transplanted to Tokyo for the best part of a year during its infamous bubble economy of the late 80s, when my dad had a role in the Japanese tour of Starlight Express, and the culture shock in the film rings true. As in Lost in Translation, we were given Japan’s five-star treatment, and surrounded by a veneer of subservience which, actually, concealed a quiet power. “Charm,” as the psychologist and author Kevin Dutton once wrote, “is the ability to roll out a red carpet for those you cannot stand in order to fast-track them, as smoothly and efficiently as possible, in the direction you want them to go.” In the end it’s Harris’s Japanese colleagues who get what they want. The 20th anniversary of Lost in Translation has prompted some grappling with the recent past, taken me down a generational rabbit hole back to the decade in which I came of age, and back to Japan with my Konica 35mm film compact, to peer behind the curtain of Sofia Coppola’s magnum opus.
I’d been keeping an eye on the 2000s for a while, wondering when they would begin to assume a shape, like the 80s, or the 90s, did, and there is now enough distance to recognise the contours of a decade that began with 9/11 and ended in a global financial crisis. Think about the humongous sociopolitical shifts since the film’s UK premiere in October 2003. Back then, MySpace was a month old, Tony Blair was halfway through his second term as prime minister and seven months into the Iraq war, R Kelly’s Ignition (Remix) remained one of the most played tracks in nightclubs, and Vladimir Putin may have been toying with the idea of Russia joining Nato. If I was still subconsciously associating Coppola’s Oscar-winning breakthrough with all things youthful, subcultural and hip, its portentous birthday was my wake-up call. People don’t call things hip any more, for a start, and the hipster, so personified in its proto-iteration by Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte, is a decidedly 00s phenomenon.
Lost in Translation appeared in the first half of a decade in which the left had power and lost touch, and gen Xers who’d modelled themselves as countercultural drifters and ravers in the 90s sold out and bought up east London, to let at inflated prices to the generation who missed the boat, us millennials. Multiculturalism wasn’t a dirty word then, and while the year 2000 promised a new dawn of peace in an increasingly globalised planet, it grossly failed to deliver. By the end of the decade it seemed to me, a young man then in his 20s, that the world was in ruins. The failures in those years, while we were averting our eyes and reading Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, listening to Chilled Ibiza and Air’s Talkie Walkie, paved the way for the dystopia that was to follow: the crippling age of austerity, Trump, Brexit, the Windrush scandal, Covid, growing awareness of the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, the fractures on social media, mumble rap.
Conversely, perhaps it’s precisely this sagging weight of 20 disappointing years that makes Lost in Translation as compelling as ever. The late scholar Mark Fisher pinpointed the year he believed the future died as 2003, the year the film was released. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world,” he wrote, “than the end of capitalism.” According to Fisher, the 2006 film Children of Men, which is set two decades into the future and depicts a society in which no children have been born for 20 years, is really asking: “What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises?” And by the “young”, he means my generation of apolitical, celebrity-obsessed zombies whose only rebellion was to reach outside our era to obscure references of the past and wear them on a T-shirt. Its sterility was summed up well by the critic Mark Greif, who wrote, of the era of the hipster: “It did not yield great literature, but it made good use of fonts.” The thing is, as a generation we knew things were shit (there was even a book published in 2005 called Is It Just Me Or Is Everything Shit? The Encyclopedia of Modern Life), but anything that kicked against the prevailing system was swallowed up by it; the 2000s were the age of “Che [Guevara] chic”, activists jobbing as corporate diversity consultants, and music genres formerly born of protest transfigured into Lily Allen’s ironic, reggae-tinged mockney 50 Cent cover Nan You’re a Window Shopper.
It’s a dramatic and depressing thought, but for me, Lost in Translation represents the death of the future; the last time I remember seeing something that genuinely surprised me. It didn’t scream newness, or protest, but the subtly transgressive configuration of ingredients produced something the world had never seen before. It was the understated apex of a great flourishing of gen X genius that runs through a postmodern collection of films as wide-ranging as Donnie Darko, One Hour Photo, Kill Bill 1 and 2, Fight Club, Memento, anything that Gaspar Noé, Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze made, Amélie, American Beauty and American Psycho. Whatever you think of those films, they turned audience expectations upside down.
The director of photography on Lost in Translation (and Being John Malkovich and Adaptation) was Lance Acord. He tells me that, comparing the amazing array of creativity in cinema in the five years between 1999 and 2004 with the output of the past five years, it’s difficult not to find the current era lacking. “But it’s hard for me to fit Lost in Translation into the context of the early 2000s, or any period, or genre. It’s timeless. For me, as a cinematographer, what was so special about filming it was how Sofia conceived the story visually. When she makes films she has a series of individual images in her head that define the narrative; she doesn’t rely on dialogue or plot devices but communicates what characters are feeling with a specific cinematic language. It is a different form of storytelling, and it was incredibly satisfying to capture one of her visions on film, like the image of Bill Murray sat on a bed in a yukata.”
It’s true that Sofia Coppola used none of the gimmicks of her male-heavy peer group, no mind-bending plot twists or avant-garde camera trickery. In fact, Acord tells me, it was shot mostly on an Aaton 35-III, a 35mm camera Jean-Luc Godard had commissioned with the brief that it fit into the glove box of his car – also handy for carrying around Tokyo streets at night discreetly. I still recall the shock of the new the first time I saw the bold opening shot, in which a Kevin Shields riff scores a closeup of Scarlett Johansson’s horizontal back in sheer pink underwear. I’m a similar age to Johansson, and though the shot was not entirely dissimilar to something you might have found in the infamous lad mags aimed at my demographic back then – Loaded, FHM, Nuts, Zoo – there was something about its colour palette and refinement that made it appear as if from another dimension. Coppola has said the shot was inspired by the 1970s hyperrealist paintings of John Kacere, but does just enough to subvert the male gaze implicit in those paintings and turn it into something distinctly feminine. The pink pants are slightly too big, the pale blue merino top slightly too casual and comfortable-looking, the body slightly too real, in a decade of thongs, touched-up tans, fake boobs, and size-zero waists, to code-signal to the fabricated male fantasy of the time.
Over email, Coppola tells me of another inspiration for this subtle, feminine mood: a young Japanese photographer who came to prominence in the 1990s called Hiromix. “She was a huge influence – it was before Instagram and snapshot culture, and it was so cool for me to see this intimate world of girls, the way she showed it, that I really related to.” Coppola echoes this in a new book, published by Mack, Sofia Coppola Archive: “[Japan] seemed to be a place where girl culture was dominant… I met Hiromix, and her photographs made a big impression on me… with all this in my head, I sat at my dining table at night back in Los Angeles and tried to pull together impressions that I thought could come together into a story for a film.”
I caught up with Hiromix this spring, in her leafy neighbourhood in Tokyo, and for her, remembering the turn of the century brought back mixed emotions. On the one hand, Japan had been in the economic doldrums after the bursting of the bubble economy, but this led to a changing of the guard – and a photography scene once dominated by older men with expensive cameras gave way to a younger generation of female photographers who created snapshot culture with cheap 35mm compacts. Known as onnanoko shashin, “girly photography”, it included artists such as Yurie Nagashima and Mika Ninagawa, but Hiromix was its megastar.
As we strolled the sakura-lined suburban backstreets taking photographs, we talked about the compact camera I was shooting on, which Hiromix had made famous; the Konica Big Mini. She was all smiles, but winced when I mentioned another Japanese compact, the Yashica T4. That camera is forever associated with the disgraced fashion photographer Terry Richardson who, along with Russell Brand, seems the ultimate relic of what the Economist recently called “the nasty noughties”. And if you want another reason to hold back on the 2000s nostalgia, you need only look at the 2005 “Sex Issue” of Vice, which features Hiromix on the cover, and included photographs of her apparently having sex with Richardson, as well as a blindfold competition to see who gives the best blowjobs, “gays or girls”, and a nauseating photo essay featuring Iraqi corpses, where the first question posed by Vice to the anonymous photographer, is: “So, what’s the pussy sitch out there?” (Thank god for “cancel culture” and “the woke brigade”!) Hiromix regrets those hypersexualised days, and told me she was exploited by older male photographers, and though she still seemed to be on OK terms with Coppola, as we came to the end of our walk, she looked at me and said: “People tell me I inspired Lost in Translation, but if that’s true, then I think maybe Sofia misunderstood my work.”
This ambivalence about the film is echoed by other Japanese people who featured in it, such as Akiko Monou (the girl in the fur hat who sings karaoke with Murray), Akira Matsui, a pro skateboarder who appears as Hans, and senior staff at the Park Hyatt Tokyo (the film’s setting), for whom the making of the movie brought back fond memories, but the film itself raised eyebrows. “Those party scenes,” Monou tells me, “were such a great portrayal of Japan at that time. Nobody had smartphones, so everybody would let their hair down more, and it captured that sense of carefree fun. But I’m not sure about other parts of the film; I think some of the Japanese characters – like the director shouting at Bill Murray – were a little… exaggerated.”
A less diplomatic word might have been “stereotypical”. Matsui says he understands some of the criticisms levelled at the film, but also thinks Bill and Charlotte’s night out in Tokyo, orchestrated by Fumihiro “Charlie Brown” Hayashi (who plays himself, the editor of a cult Japanese magazine called Dune), really captures Tokyo in the 00s. “In those scenes you have cameos from Nobuhiko Kitamura, the founder of [fashion brand] Hysteric Glamour, [renowned designer and musician] Hiroshi Fujiwara, Hiromix, gallery owners, artists, surfers… they were all brought together by Charlie, who was so important for the art world because he connected the underground with the mainstream.”
Hayashi was Coppola’s introduction to the scene in Japan in the 1990s, she tells me: “He was important, as he first hired me to take photographs and cared about my point of view, which gave me the confidence to make my first film, and he showed me an exciting world in Tokyo. He had culture and taste and appreciated my eye.” It’s worth remembering that all this followed the spectacular fallout from Coppola’s lambasted performance as Mary Corleone in the final instalment of her father’s Godfather trilogy. Far from Hollywood, Japan was a place where she could reinvent herself.
No matter the location, Coppola often presents the world she knows in her films: white, wealthy, feminine. I grew up brown-skinned, working-class, and male, so it would be easy for me to think of Coppola, and in turn Charlotte, as the quintessential poor little rich girl. I often wonder what it is, exactly, about Lost in Translation, beyond a nostalgia for how the world might have turned out, that resonates so deeply. I’m not alone – the film’s most popular Google search is: “What is the point of Lost in Translation?”, a question I put to Sofia herself.
“The film started with wanting to make something about my experience of being [in Tokyo] in my 20s at that time and the feeling it gave me. The wandering, being away from home and the thrill of discovery. It is all about a mood, a feeling to me, trying to capture how I felt there… I was so surprised so many people connected to it, it was so personal to me and I thought: ‘Who cares about a privileged young woman who doesn’t know what she’s doing with her life?’ But the ultimate thing it was about, to me, was a connection. And I think we’re all looking for this. It was about unexpected moments of connection.”
That’s it, exactly. Encoded in Lost in Translation is that kind of liminal melancholy we feel at certain points in our lives, when one era is ending, but another has not quite begun. These moments often precede a breakthrough, if we only pay enough attention. And to go back to nostalgia for a moment… In The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym suggests the term could be split into two – not always binary – types: restorative and reflective. The former is what nationalism thrives on: the attempt to rebuild an imagined past that never really existed (Make America great again!). The latter, and perhaps healthier, version of nostalgia, however, “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt… [it] loves details, not symbols.”
What makes me want to hold on to Lost in Translation, in spite of its flaws, made only more evident by the years? The details. The languorous, laconic beauty of pre-smartphone travel. The scenes where Charlotte is alone in her hotel room, listening to a CD (Beck’s downbeat album Sea Change came out during the month of filming, and drove those scenes, according to Acord), gazing at the skyline or daydreaming on her bed, are some of the movie’s most stirring and, looking back, poignant passages. Charlotte would be on that bed scrolling her socials now – no way would she have hung out with Bob. I miss this slowness, or what Coppola’s Italian ancestors might have called otium divinorum: divine idleness. I also miss the ambiguity, and the idea that if Charlotte and Bob were real, their experiences would linger on only in private memories and Polaroids (“loss is itself lost”, to quote Fisher again). I miss the promise of such counterintuitive encounters; in 2023, my WhatsApp groups are formed around my loves and alliances, algorithms lead me toward confirmation bias, Netflix suggests films it thinks I will like based on films I’ve already seen. But I think of lifelong friends made during my pre-internet travels, because I was stuck with them somewhere far away from home, and struck up a conversation because I had nowhere else to go (like online). The scene where Bob and a Japanese man (in real life, the gallerist Akimitsu Naruyama) try to converse in bad French reminds me of encounters with Japanese kids I had as a child, our friendships revolving around not just our similarities, but also our differences, which brings to mind another anachronistic 90s/early 00s word: fusion – that is, the blurring of seemingly disparate things to create something new.
What to do with nostalgia for an era of such contradictions? Hegel thought that each era contained a specific insight, and nostalgia was the holding on to what was good. The key was not to want to go back, but to achieve equilibrium in the present by mixing the best bits of each era and losing the worst elements. When I asked Sofia Coppola a couple of such retrospective questions, however, she (perhaps wisely) gave me short answers. Twenty years later, is there anything she’d change about Lost in Translation? “I feel like [my films] are what they are, I wouldn’t want to change them…” Does Lost in Translation make her nostalgic? “It was a different time, and it’s nice to go back to it through the film.”
Maybe, in the end, that’s all that should be said for those of us who came of age in the 2000s; it was a different time. It is nice to go back to it through film. Only through film.
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Johny Pitts is a writer, artist and broadcaster. His new series, The Failure of the Future, will air on BBC Radio 4 from 16 January
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